Small Town

nineteen

In the days after he’d walked in on the leavings of the Curry Hill Carpenter, Jerry Pankow had wanted nothing more than to call his remaining clients and tell them to find someone else. He even found himself considering a return to Hamtramck for the first time since he had the good fortune to leave the place.

“How can I stay here?” he demanded. “People are dying all over the place.”

“Nobody lives forever,” Lois told him. “Not even in Hamtramck, although I grant you it must seem that way. Not counting roaches and waterbugs, have you ever killed anything?”

“No, but—”

“Or spiders. That’s what women need men for, you know. To kill spiders. The day she saw me kill a spider in the kitchen, Jacqui knew we had a chance of making it together. You’ve had some bad luck, Jerry. One of your customers went home with the wrong guy, and another one opened the door to the wrong guy, but they were two different guys. They’re sure the writer killed Marilyn, and they’re just as sure he had nothing to do with the mess at the whorehouse.”

“Mess,” he said, “does not begin to describe it.”

“Don’t quibble, Jerry. Stay with me on this. And bear in mind one of the lessons sobriety teaches us. Your lifelong conviction notwithstanding, you are not actually the piece of shit the world revolves around.”

“Meaning?”

“You tell me.”

He thought about it. “Meaning I’m the only connection between Marilyn and Molly, and that’s just coincidental. They’re not dead because they had the bad luck to hire me.”

“Very good. Now go to a meeting.”

“I just came from a meeting.”

“So?”

“I guess another one couldn’t hurt just now. Lois? Suppose it happens again?”

“Happens again? I don’t... oh, you mean if you walk in on a third dead body?”

“It would be a fifth, actually. A third, what did you call it? A third mess.”

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “If that happens, you can go back to Hamtramck. I’ll even pay your plane fare. But Jerry? No matter how many dead bodies you find, you still can’t drink.”

In the end, he didn’t even take a day off. He couldn’t really afford to; the closing of the whorehouse represented a serious drop in his income. So he got up each morning and took care of the three bars, then serviced whatever residential customers were on his schedule. And went to as many meetings as he could fit in.

This morning, Saturday, the forecast was for near-record levels of heat and humidity, and you could already feel both indicators starting to climb by the time he got outside. Saturdays and Sundays were light days, morning days, with nothing on his schedule but the three bars. They were apt to be grungier than usual on Saturday mornings, after the intensity of Thank-God-It’s-Friday celebrating, and sometimes a bartender, eager to get out of there after an especially late night, would slack off on his part of the deal, leaving the chairs on the floor, say, and unwashed glasses on the bar top.

He walked to Death Row, and long before he got within sight of the place he was breathing in the smell of it, the strong odor of a fire that had been put out with water. He paid no attention, because it was something you smelled a lot in that part of town. The Hudson piers would catch fire, especially on the Jersey side, and the creosote-soaked timbers would send up plumes of black smoke for hours.

Then he drew closer and saw four or five people gathered on the sidewalk across from Death Row, which was unusual at that hour, when the block was almost invariably deserted. And he looked at what they were looking at, and saw the windows all broken out on the building’s upper floors, and the streaks of soot and fire damage on the lintels.

He joined the four men across the street. They were quick to tell him what had happened, although they had slightly different versions. There’d been a fire, certainly, and it had started in the basement leather bar, Death Row, and pretty much gutted the entire structure before the firefighters got it under control.

“They threw one rough trade type out, and he came back with a gun and opened up on everybody, and then he started a fire.”

“I didn’t hear anything about a gun. Just some queen with a resentment, and Buddha was killed trying to keep her from getting in the door.”

“Please. It was bashers, it had to be.”

“Every time a gay man stubs his toe somebody calls it gay-bashing.”

“Well, what do you call it when three gay bars go up in flames on the same night? Do you think they were struck by lightning?”

“I felt so wonderful during Gay Pride Week, and now this has to happen. I heard there were over thirty people killed at Death Row alone.”

“I heard forty.”

“I heard twenty-seven, including some of the people who lived upstairs.”

“People actually lived upstairs of that hole?”

“A friend of mine, he’s a nurse at St. Vincent’s in the Burn Unit, and he said they brought in men with third-degree burns over eighty percent of their body. When it’s that bad you’re not expected to live, and it’s probably better if you don’t.”

“I can never remember, is it first-degree that’s the worst?”

“Only with murder. With burns, third-degree is the worst.”

“There’s no fourth degree?”

“Only what the firemen call Crispy Critters.”

“Oh, gross.”

“I heard it was worse at the other bars.”

“No, I heard Death Row was the worst.”

“I just hope the cops get them. It must have been two or three of them, because they spilled a whole fifty-gallon drum of petrol down the stairwell.”

“The drums hold fifty-five gallons, and when did you turn into an Englishman?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Petrol? She thinks she’s Camilla Parker-Bowles.”

“It would have taken at least three men to get past Buddha.”

“Or one man with a gun, and is there a law that says every big man with a shaved head has to be called Buddha?”

“His name was Eric, and he was a good person.”

“You knew him?”

“He was my friend.”

“Then I’m sorry. I didn’t mean...”

“That’s all right.”

He knew the answer, but asked anyway: “The other bars...”

Cheek, he was told. And someplace farther east that nobody had heard of, Harriman’s, something like that.

He could have corrected them on the name, and told them it wasn’t a gay bar, but why? Why do anything?

He turned away and walked back home.

The firebombings of the three Chelsea bars were immediately gathered into a single case file, and the death toll alone — seventy-three killed, plus twelve so seriously injured they were not expected to recover — ensured the investigation would wind up in the hands of the Major Cases squad. Although it took a few hours for the FDNY investigators to officially label the fires as arson, the cops had it listed that way from the beginning. The eyewitness testimony, confused and contradictory as it was, all agreed on one point: each establishment had been deliberately attacked with explosive and/or incendiary devices.

With 9/11 less than a year old, and with suicide bombings almost a daily occurrence in Israel, there was widespread agreement that terrorism couldn’t be ruled out. Accordingly, FBI investigators coordinated with the team from Major Cases, and the Office of Homeland Security flew up an expert from Washington.

According to one theory, the virtually simultaneous attacks on the three targets bespoke a high degree of organization. Furthermore, at least one witness at Death Row reported that the attackers wore camouflage gear.

In response, others argued that the attacks were by no means simultaneous, and that as much as three-quarters of an hour might have elapsed between the first attack, on Harrigan’s, and the third, at Death Row. Even on foot a perpetrator could easily cover the required distance in that amount of time. As for the camo gear, it turned out to have been worn not by a team of attackers but by two of those in attendance; evidently their garb, complemented by paratrooper boots, had been deemed sufficiently in keeping with the bar’s ambience as to be allowable under the dress code.

Both of the camouflaged individuals, one a fashion photographer during daylight hours, the other a stockroom manager, were in Death Row’s notorious back room at the time of the bombing. Like almost everyone trapped in that cul-de-sac, they died there.

Saturday afternoon, a little more than fourteen hours after the initial assault on Harrigan’s, the cops got a break.

Dennis Hurley lived with his wife and three sons in a detached ranch house (an emotionally detached ranch house, his wife’s smartass brother called it) just over the Queens line in Nassau County, near the Hempstead Turnpike and within walking distance of Belmont Race Track, which would have been handy if he cared for horse racing, but he didn’t. He liked to go out in a bluefish boat when they were running, and he liked to watch sports on television, even golf, and he liked to roast corn and grill steaks and chops in the backyard, which is what he was getting ready to do when his wife came out to tell him Arthur Pender was on the phone.

“Tell him to come on over,” he said.

“Tell him yourself,” she suggested, but when he got on the phone Pender didn’t want to talk about backyard barbecues, or Tiger Woods’s chances of a Grand Slam.

“Those firebombings,” he said. “You hear about them out where you are?”

“I’m less’n a mile from bein’ in Queens,” he said. “The only difference is the schools, and it’s not as much of a difference as we were hoping. Yeah, of course I heard. We get New York One out here, not to mention it was all over CNN this morning.”

“You happen to notice the names of the places got hit?”

“I noticed where they were. A few blocks to the east and they’d be our headache.”

“Be Major Cases either way, but that’s not the point. I’ll give you the names. Harrigan’s, Cheek, and Death Row. Ring any bells?”

“I don’t think so. Gay bars, right? And the last one sounds like it must have been a charmer, but... wait a minute, Arthur.”

“Dingdong, huh?”

“That Polish kid, one we thought linked our case to Charles Street. Except it didn’t, because What’s-his-name was home all night and he could prove it.”

“Creighton.”

“Yeah, and we didn’t like him for it anyway, once we met him. These joints, Death Row and the rest, they were all on his list, weren’t they? Not Creighton’s but the kid’s.”

“Pankow’s his name.”

“Tip of my tongue, Arthur.”

“They weren’t just on his list. They were his list. Went and mopped their floors seven days a week. Only other customers he had were private residences that he went to once a week.”

“Jesus. You know, I heard the names myself, but I was watching TV with half my mind on the sports pages in Newsday. I should have caught it.”

“You would’ve, next time you heard the news.”

“Yeah, maybe. Shit, Arthur, we got to go in, don’t we? I mean, we can’t phone it in, and it won’t wait till morning.”

“Afraid not.”

“Wouldn’t you know I just lit the fucking charcoal. Well, she can grill. She never gets it right, but if I’m not here I won’t know the difference, will I?”

“We’ll go to that Malaysian place you like.”

“That’s if we even get time to eat. You want me to come by for you?”

“No, I want to have my car with me,” Arthur Pender said. “I’ll meet you there.”

The focus of the investigation shifted when Pender and Hurley raised the possibility of a direct link between the firebombings and the activities of the Curry Hill Carpenter. The immediate result was an expansion of the task force investigating the bombings, with the inclusion of personnel from the Thirteenth Precinct previously assigned to the Curry Hill investigation.

Evidence began to accumulate, and the argument that the killings were linked was bolstered significantly with the discovery of a stainless steel claw hammer with a black rubber grip among the burned-out wreckage of Cheek. Witnesses had reported the window was smashed before the first Molotov cocktail was thrown, and investigators theorized that the hammer might have been used to break the glass. While there was no way to tie the hammer to the Curry Hill murders, forensics determined that it could well have been the implement used to beat the women to death. “If it wasn’t this hammer,” a technician said, “it was one a lot like it. It might not have had a claw on the back of it, because he didn’t use the claw, but this is what the business end of it would have looked like.”

Eyewitness testimony was difficult to sort out, but there were plenty of police personnel assigned to the task, and some common elements began to emerge. Reports accumulated of an older white male, of medium height and slightly built, ordinary in appearance and unremarkable in dress, who had been observed both in and around the targeted premises. At both Cheek and Harrigan’s, persons who’d been on the scene hours earlier recalled an older man who had ordered a drink and left it untouched.

A waitress in a coffee shop across from Harrigan’s thought she might have had a customer fitting that description; on that Friday night, he’d lingered over a cup of coffee for a long time, and she seemed to recall he’d looked out the window a good deal of the time. He’d had some of his coffee, but he never finished it, and if he ever said a word she couldn’t remember it. He hadn’t even asked for coffee, had ordered by pointing to another patron’s cup, then nodded when she asked if that was what he wanted.

Other cops canvassed the immediate environs of the whorehouse, coming up in short order with a manager in another coffee shop who reported similar behavior, although he couldn’t furnish even a general description of the customer in question. He remembered him because a waiter had asked him to check the coffee and see if anything was the matter with it. He’d checked, and it was no better or worse than usual. The customer, whoever he was, had already paid without complaint, and left the premises. The manager might have seen the man, he was behind the register and had presumably taken his money, but had no sense of which customer he’d been or what he looked like. The waiter might remember, but he was away for several days visiting family in Philadelphia.

FDNY inspectors established that the propellant was ordinary gasoline. Anyone with an automobile had ready access to gasoline, but one detective noted that the perpetrator had never been linked to a motor vehicle, and could quite easily have covered the distance from Harrigan’s to Cheek to Death Row on foot. This prompted him to check with attendants at nearby gas stations, and on Eleventh Avenue he turned up an excitable fellow who remembered a man who’d wanted to buy gas for a stalled car. “But I didn’t sell him nothing,” he insisted. “I told him you gotta have an approved container. He went away, I never saw him again.”

The man was only able to furnish a vague general description, but it was encouragingly close to the one then in circulation — white, middle-aged or older, medium height, slight build, no visible distinguishing marks. It led him to widen his search, and a few blocks below Fourteenth Street he stopped at a Getty station — the last one left in the world, as far as he could tell — where the proprietor, one Khadman Singh, remembered selling two gallons of gas — regular, unleaded — to a white man perhaps fifty-five or sixty years old. Sometime in the middle of the week this was, he recalled. This was not unusual, people paid no attention to gauges, they ran out of gas all the time. This man had a container and paid cash for his gas, which was not unusual either, because who would bother with a credit card for a three-dollar sale? But what was unusual, in Singh’s experience, was that the man had approached from the right, which is to say from the south, or downtown, and had walked off in the opposite direction, heading uptown on Eighth Avenue.

While most of the task force worked from the crime-scene evidence, a small group focused on the common denominator of all four venues, the three bars and the whorehouse. Which is to say Jerry Pankow.

He was interrogated at length, over and over. No one suspected him of any conscious involvement in the perpetrator’s scenario, but it seemed entirely possible he knew something, even if he didn’t know that he knew it. The series of layered interrogations aimed at unearthing unconscious knowledge, and while they didn’t lead anywhere, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Another possibility lay in anticipating the next outrage. No one thought the man who’d just scored what a Post columnist called a hat trick for terrorists would call it a day and rest on his laurels. He looked to be that classic urban nightmare, the serial terrorist. Reporters were writing sidebar columns on George Metesky, the Mad Bomber of a half century ago, who’d planted explosive devices in public places in an unfathomable private vendetta against Con Edison. Others, by no means convinced that the whorehouse murders were his first venture, were looking at every unsolved crime since the calendar ticked over to start the new millennium.

And policemen, trying to get ahead of him, staked out the apartments of Jerry Pankow’s remaining clients.

“I don’t have any clients,” he told them. “I called them all, I told them I’m through. I’m out of business anyway, it was the commercial clients that paid the rent. The rest, there were five of them, twenty-five dollars a day, you do the math. I want a real job, I want to work in an office or something. With other people around, living ones.”

They staked out the residences of his customers — his former customers — just in case. And sat back and waited.

The razor was another source of leads.

It lay beneath the dead body of Eric “Buddha” Kesselring, twenty-eight, of Ludlow Street, whose throat it had been used to slash and whose blood had pooled around it. Thus it presented a challenge to the lab technicians who examined it; they had to remove the blood without destroying any trace evidence it might conceal. When they were done, they had two good fingerprints and one partial, which they turned over to an investigator who sat down with them at her computer.

The computer search came up empty. The perpetrator (if that’s whose prints were on the razor, which seemed a fair working assumption) had never been fingerprinted. This meant he’d never been arrested, had never applied for a government job, and had probably never served in the military. It meant, too, that the prints on the razor couldn’t point him out now, but might help confirm his guilt if and when he wound up in custody.

Prints aside, the razor presented some interesting possibilities. The first was that it was the killer’s own razor, that he’d owned it for decades, that he kept it either for sentimental value or because it was what he preferred to use on his whiskers. If that was the case you could probably forget about tracing it, but suppose he’d acquired it recently, for the express purpose of cutting a throat?

There were still men who bought straight razors, detectives discovered, and still manufacturers that produced them. The majority of customers were barbers. Not many men still went to the barbershop to be shaved, but those who did were looking for an old-fashioned shave, with a shaving brush and a straight razor, not a noisy buzz with an electric shaver or foam from a can and a disposable plastic device. A straight razor, the kind the barber honed on a leather strop, that was what they expected to be shaved with.

It turned out there was a wholesaler on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn who sold barber supplies, including straight razors. He identified the razor as one made in Solingen, Germany, by a firm that had gone out of business (or at least stopped producing razors) some twenty years ago. That didn’t make the razor an antique, just an old razor, and, since straight razors didn’t change much from one decade to the next, it was possible that there were still retailers who had similar razors in stock. It was also very possible that some local barbers, who kept their razors for a lifetime, had razors like this one.

The wholesaler’s own retail accounts included two not far from the perpetrator’s field of operations. Both were drugstores, and both carried a wide line of homeopathic remedies and old-fashioned devices. One was on Third Avenue at Nineteenth Street, the other on Sixth Avenue in the Village, between Eighth and Ninth Streets.

Neither had sold a straight razor to anyone within the past month.

Someone thought of thrift shops. There were quite a few in the immediate area, and two police officers worked their way down the list, finding quite a few that had a straight razor or two for sale, but none that had actually sold one. Then, in the Salvation Army store on Eighth Avenue, a woman with mean little eyes in an otherwise grandmotherly face said that no one had bought a straight razor from her, but one man had stolen one.

“If I’d seen him,” she said, “I might have stopped him on his way out and suggested he pay for it. Or perhaps not. After all, he was armed, wasn’t he? Though I can’t say he looked terribly dangerous.”

If she’d seen him? If she hadn’t seen him, how did she know he’d taken the razor? How did she know whether or not he looked dangerous?

“The security camera. We have two of them and they’re running all the time while we’re open. At the end of the day I review the tapes. Most of the time there’s nothing to look at, you can fast-forward through vast stretches of nothingness, but I’ll slow it down when I see anybody behaving furtively. Or quite boldly — they’re bold as brass, some of them.”

It was useful to review the tape in order to keep shoplifters from returning. When an offender turned up after he’d been caught on tape, he was simply turned away at the door, which was safer all around than trying to stop a suspected thief on his way out. No one could sue you for false arrest that way. And the value of the goods stolen was pretty much beside the point; they were all donated, after all, and the few items of real value got snatched up early on by dealers.

And did she by any chance still have the tape of the man pocketing the straight razor?

She did. They had thirty tapes for the two cameras, and rotated them, so that each day’s taping erased what had been recorded two weeks previously. She had to scan several tapes to find the right one, but she was able to go through them at great speed because she knew precisely what she was looking for. When she got there she slowed the tape to normal speed, and the two cops watched over her shoulder as an aging white man wearing a plaid shirt and dark pants picked a razor off a shelf, flicked it open, closed it, flicked it open a second time, rubbed it with his thumb to test it for sharpness, closed it again, looked around casually, and just as casually slipped it in his pocket.

They gave her a receipt for the tape and took it to a technician who tinkered with it electronically to sharpen the focus and increase the definition, then printed out copies. You couldn’t see the face very well, the camera was placed high and to the side, but it was something to work with.

The Sikh at the Getty station looked at one of the prints and said that it looked like the man to whom he’d sold the two gallons of gas. The witnesses who remembered a man who ordered a drink and left without touching it said it was hard to tell, but it was certainly possible that this was the man they’d seen. A man in the burn unit at St. Vincent, who’d gotten a glimpse of the man when he’d been about to launch the second Molotov cocktail at Harrigan’s, said he couldn’t tell; when he pictured the face, it morphed into the features of Satan, horns and all. Maybe it was him, maybe not. He couldn’t tell.

A patrolman, months out of the academy, came up with a suggestion. Collect surveillance tapes for the forty-eight hours preceding the massacre from every available source in the neighborhood — ATMs, liquor stores, check-cashing services, building lobbies, everywhere. Security cameras were all over the place nowadays, you couldn’t pick your nose anywhere outside your own house without a good chance of having the moment recorded. Nobody ever looked at all those tapes unless something happened — except for the gimlet-eyed lady at the Sally Ann thrift shop, who evidently had time on her hands. They got recycled, over and over, but maybe there were some that hadn’t been recycled yet, and maybe the Carpenter — the newspapers were still calling him that, and consequently so were the cops — maybe the Carpenter had gotten his picture taken somewhere down the line.

A dozen cops went around collecting tapes. Armed with prints made from the thrift shop tape, they and others sat in front of video screens and looked for the Carpenter. A veteran patrolman named Henry Gelbfuss spotted him, on a tape from a Rite Aid drugstore, and everybody agreed it was the Carpenter. He was the man on the thrift shop tape, no question.

The Rite Aid tape, enlarged and sharpened and defined, was still a far cry from a Bachrach portrait, but it was good enough to release to the media, good enough to show on television, good enough to print on every front page, along with a number to call if you recognized the man in the photo.

A lot of people did.

Nailed!

That was the headline in the Post, accompanied by an artist’s rendition of the man whose security camera photo had appeared prominently throughout the media the day before. The drawing showed a disembodied hand holding a claw hammer, which had evidently been used to drive a nail through the man’s forehead, pinning him to the wall.

The Daily News showed their artist’s rendition of the photo, with the Carpenter, a hammer in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, pinned against a similar wall, but held there in this case by searchlight beams. GOTCHA! cried the headline.

The implication seemed to be that the Carpenter had been captured. This may have been intentional — before they got to the newsstand, many New Yorkers would already have learned from radio or television that the city’s most wanted criminal had been at least tentatively identified. They’d be quicker to buy a paper if it appeared to promise a further development in the story.

The text explained that the Carpenter had been nailed, or gotten, only to the extent that authorities now knew who he was. A variety of callers (our readers, the Post labeled them, staking a claim) had agreed that the man pictured in the press and on TV was one William Boyce Harbinger, sixty-two, the recently retired director of research at Lister Durgen Augenblick/Advertising.

Several of the callers were men and women who had worked with Harbinger at LDA. All had lost touch with him since his retirement in late 2000, and none could offer a clue as to what might have sent him off on a murderous rampage. He was described as a quiet man (“It’s always the quiet ones,” readers all over the city murmured), and none of his coworkers reported having had any contact with him outside the office.

Other callers recognized him from the Upper West Side neighborhood where he had lived for decades, and some were neighbors of the Harbingers in the Amsterdam Avenue apartment building. They agreed that he was quiet, almost reclusive, and no one seemed to recall having seen either Harbinger or his wife in some months.

Police cars from all over Manhattan congregated at the intersection of Eighty-fourth and Amsterdam. Cops surrounded the building, blocked off the exits, filled the lobby. The superintendent, summoned from an evening in front of the television set, said that he hadn’t seen Mrs. Harbinger since sometime late the previous year, when she’d been taken from the building on a stretcher. “They didn’t use no siren,” he said, “so maybe it was too late.”

And he hadn’t seen Mr. Harbinger for a long time, either, though he couldn’t say how long. He hadn’t paid his monthly maintenance charges in a long time, but he’d owned the apartment since it went co-op thirty years ago, and paid rent there before then, and the apartment was a very valuable piece of property, owned free and clear, no mortgage, so you knew he’d pay the maintenance sooner or later.

The super had keys to all the apartments, and at one point, concerned that something might have happened to Harbinger, he’d knocked on the door, then let himself in. There was nobody home, and no signs that anything might be amiss. The place was dusty and the air stale, as if no one had lived there recently.

The super thought maybe he’d gone to Florida, something like that. And maybe he was back by now, because the super hadn’t been in the apartment since. His mailbox was never jammed up, it was always clear, so either he was living in there now, keeping to himself the way he did, or at least he was coming by to collect his mail.

The super let the cops into the apartment, and they found it as he’d described it. There were additional bills from the co-op association for the monthly maintenance charges, slipped under the door every month, and there was the usual array of menus from Asian restaurants, and the air was stale and the horizontal surfaces coated with dust.

What there was not was any sign of William Boyce Harbinger, or any indication of where he might have gone.